New York

“Student visa.” The young man in the uniform of a US Customs and Border Protection agent sighed and repeated the words, slowly. “Stu-dent vi-sa.”

Charlie Wilson looked at his daughter, Connie. Well? They had half an hour before their flight left Toronto for LaGuardia in New York.

Connie shook her head. She shuffled again through the pile of papers in her hands. No visa there.

“If you don’t have a stamped student visa, you cannot be allowed into the United States as a student, can you? Make sense? We can’t have just anybody and everybody entering the country.”

Charlie thought of the thousands of “irregulars” who had walked across the border from the US into Canada’s welcoming arms in the recent past. Not a visa among them.

They had shown the paperwork from the American Musical and Dramatic Academy (AMDA) that showed that Connie had been awarded a substantial but not full scholarship based on the audition she had given in Vancouver. A portion to be paid, plus travel.

Connie pointed to her folder again. “That’s all I got.”

The young man (“Valadez” on his chest-mounted nameplate) sighed. “I’ll talk to someone,” he left.

Twenty-five minutes to go.

Charlie wondered for a second if declaring themselves refugees might work. He had managed to acquire the funds that would get his daughter to New York and decided that she should not make the first trip alone but needed a street-smart companion. (He put aside the memory of becoming lost at Pike Place Market on his first trip to Seattle and needing help to locate the Space Needle on his second.) The community of Spinner’s Inlet had been generous once it was understood the money was for Connie, and not Charlie.

The Inlet Players had donated all the takings from a three-night run of Playboy of the Western World. Constable Ravina Sidhu had hinted to Cedars pub owner Matthew Blacklock that to donate one night’s takings would be a small thing compared with a surprise visit from a BC Liquor and Cannabis Regulation Branch inspector who might be interested in what was really meant by “last orders.” And Gilbert Chen had stuck small flags onto certain items in the store bearing the words, “Yea, Connie!” and a matching cash box on the counter.

Valadez returned with a large woman in agent uniform, who said, “Canadians, eh? Eh?” and chuckled at her wit. She grilled them about their past. Charlie waited nervously for the cannabis question, but the woman passed on it.

Twenty minutes.

The woman started chatting about the differences between their two countries, especially the rules for border crossing, and Charlie looked at the clock.

Fifteen minutes.

Finally she stamped a temporary visa and gave them an address in New York where they must appear. “If you make your plane right now, that is,” she said.

They did, with no time left.

Charlie thought there might be time for a quick beer when they landed at LaGuardia. It was after five o’clock and he would welcome that familiar feeling of well-being always fashioned by the first few sips of suds. Connie grabbed her bag and pointed to the taxi rank.

The cabbie, a native of Haiti, as he would tell them, advised them to lock their doors as he did his own. He chatted as they passed through neighbourhoods from Robert De Niro scripts, explaining, while narrowly avoiding challenges to his driving at several intersections, that he was a retired army sergeant, and he engaged them with his philosophy that it was unwise for other drivers to mess with a New York cabbie. And any that did with him, he would kill, he said. Charlie laughed. The driver didn’t.

The driver said that normally, he would not have the cab’s dividing window open, but “You seem like different kinda folks.”

Connie caught Charlie’s glance: we’re different?

They paused at an intersection and three youths wearing camo-patterned do-rags stepped toward the cab and peered inside. The driver lowered his window and growled something; the trio retreated.

How on earth, Charlie thought, was Connie going to survive in this place?

As they left the cab—and a hefty tip that Charlie considered the judicious thing to do—a banjo busker across the street from the hotel where they would spend their first night was singing “The Streets of New York,” a song Charlie knew well as one of the many Celtic laments Finbar O’Toole droned at the Cedars’ open mic nights.

“And remember all is not
What it seems to be,
For there’s fellas would cut ye
For the coat on yer back,
Or the watch that ye got
From yer mother …”

Charlie shuddered.

The address the woman agent had given them was at Federal Plaza in downtown Manhattan, where they headed at noon the next day after Connie had registered at AMDA and where it seemed that hundreds of people moved at a snail’s pace in a line behind rows of control barriers.

Charlie went straight to the building’s front door and explained confidently to the ex-NFL lineman guarding the place with a large revolver on his belt that they simply needed a stamp on a student visa and that “We are Canadians, so …”

The big man pointed them to the back of the line. Connie groaned, and sneezed. She was developing a cold. It was a sunny day and she had worn a thin blouse, but they were in the shadows of inconceivably huge buildings and a chilling wind cut through their canyons. They waited in the outside lineup for ninety minutes before they were admitted through the door—and into the first of three long and winding inside lineups. Half an hour took them to a wicket where a young male clerk listened, unimpressed, as Charlie explained their situation.

“You should be on the tenth floor, Room 104,” he said, and looked up and said, “Next,” as their number light (521) became history.

“You mean we needn’t have waited all this time …”

“Tenth floor, Room 104.”

In Room 104 an immigration officer was advising a man. “I remember arresting you at JFK. If you are lying now, you are in big trouble.”

Charlie believed him.

The officer turned to Charlie. “Where’s your yellow referral slip?”

“No one gave us …”

“You have to have it.”

Back to the main floor where a mood of desperation mounted in the lineups as the business day neared its end.

“Sorry,” the man behind the desk said, “but we’re closin’.”

“But …”

“Come back tomorrow. Seven AM.”

“To this desk?”

He shook his head. No. He nodded to the main door. To start all over.

“Oh, noooo,” Connie groaned.

The man shrugged, sympathetic. “Canadians. I really don’t know why we bother about visas.”

But they do.

Charlie believed in the philosophy “Never say never.” Elevator back to 104.

“No yellow slip,” he told the officer, fervently. “They’re shutting shop and we have to start the whole bloody thing over tomorrow.”

The officer shrugged.

Connie sagged.

The officer shook his head. He sighed. “Wait,” he said.

Charlie thought this was an improvement on the “Stay!” command earlier from one of the man’s colleagues to a fellow on the ground floor. The fellow had stayed.

Ten minutes and the officer relented. He laid his precious stamp on the critical paper.

“And good luck at school,” he smiled.

Charlie figured maybe just a beer somewhere before they moved on. Connie voted for move on, lots to do.

Connie’s “shared accommodation” (shared with whom?) was in an ageing, red-brick, ten-storey apartment building where a notice said, “KEEP YOUR DOORS LOCKED AT ALL TIMES” and urged those students arriving by car to “LEAVE SOMEONE WITH YOUR VEHICLE WHILE PARKING TO REGISTER.”

Good grief!

“Top floor, Dad.”

The room at least was clean. Two cots with bedding stacked on them. Two built-in closets and two sets of table and chair. Common bathroom down the hall. The view from the window was straight out of West Side Story. Flat, black-top roofs. A screaming fire truck parted the traffic.

The door banged open. A girl examined them, said, “Y’all the Canadian, right?”

“Both of us,” Charlie said.

“Ah’m Katie. From Texas. Y’ roommate, Con.”

Con?

Katie hugged Connie.

“Canadians, eh?” A large man at the door, carrying two travel bags. Texas hat, Texas belt buckle, Texas boots. A petite blonde woman entered behind him, chiding, “C’mon, move it, Chester.” And, “Ah’m Callie Boone—really, lahk Daniel. Hello, honey.” Callie hugged Connie. “Let’s get this place put together, you two. Y’all gonna be great together. Ah know it.”

She ushered Chester and Charlie aside, and within a minute the two men might not have been there as cots were agreed on and made up and other major decisions made.

Chester grinned at Charlie. “They’ll be fahn, y’know,” he said. He gestured toward the window and across and down to a flashing sign on what turned out to be Amsterdam Avenue. Red-and-green neon: McLeary’s.

“Ahrish pub, Ah believe.”

Callie turned to them. “One hour,” she said. “Then you take us all to dinner. Shoo,” she added. “We got woman stuff to do.”

Charlie looked at Connie.

“Go, Dad,” she said. She smiled. “And thank you.”

Charlie nodded at his new friend Chester. “My round,” he said.